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Monday, 30 November 2015

There’s ‘a time for everything’, the good book tells us; chapter and verse with which gardeners are only too well acquainted. Advent is upon us, the shortest, darkest days approach and, the list of gardening activities one can achieve by torchlight being disappointingly short, we are at pains to follow the seasonal exhortations, making we joy, and generally being of good cheer, with a determination that is something to behold.

The last week in November provides an ideal opportunity for such merriment, as several hundred garden broadcasters and writers descend upon the Savoy Hotel for the annual Garden Media Guild Awards. I snuck in for the second year running and, also for the second year running, was delighted to be shortlisted as a finalist in the Blog of the Year category. It’s a tangible affirmation not only of the work I’ve put into the blog over the past year, but also the enthusiasm and engagement of the community that’s grown up around the weekly posts. But while I’m both tremendously grateful and immensely proud of all of this, it didn’t make me blush half so much as receiving several generously and unexpected endorsements from gardening twitter friends (you know who you are) both before and after the awards were announced. A season to be jolly, indeed.

And, as winter follows autumn, itself turning into spring when the moment is right, it seems timely to confess that for a while now I’ve had a feeling that the blog in its current form is nearing the end of a season, and entering a period of transition. The hibernation period must necessarily be brief, but I expect this online collection of my garden witterings to emerge as a thing transformed, albeit with roots very much in the current iteration. I have in mind something slightly more than a refresh with, in time, some new features, tweaks to the structure, and a more open, airy feel about the place. At least, that’s the intention, with a view to launching early in the new year – a daunting, but exciting prospect.

In the meantime, I plan to keep these pages running, but do please excuse me if I should appear to be a little slower than usual to respond while I’m tinkering with things under the bonnet – a vehicular metaphor – time to give the blog a good winter service. ’tis the season for it, after all. fa la la la laa, la la la laaaa.

Friday, 20 November 2015

Autumn, windy and mild, with no sign of a frost. The leaves, like embers in slow motion, glow brightly as they fall, fast fading to dull ash grey and brown. Much of the garden’s energy retreats below ground at this time of year and, with a good proportion of the season’s growth now lying either upon the compost heap or the bonfire, access into the borders becomes considerably more straightforward. Conversely, passage through the garden becomes increasingly difficult. The winding grass path, charmingly informal throughout spring and summer, has by mid November become a muddy cart track, rutted and slippery, making each trip through the garden a messy and potentially hazardous affair.

O, for a red brick path! Solid under foot, and easy on the eye. Throughout my various excavations in the garden, I’ve managed to unearth a small pile of imperial red bricks in fair condition, but nowhere near the quantity I’d need for the path. I keep a beady eye out for the small ads, and auctions of reclaimed bricks on eBay, but somehow, something more pressing and grown up always seems to require paying for – a new boiler, or a replacement cross-member for the chassis on the venerable land rover. Even – dare I say it – plants. And in the meanwhile, sure as eggs is eggs, the path turns to mush.

This winter, I’m taking steps to avoid the quagmire. A roll of grass reinforcement mesh – the kind of stuff you find lurking just beneath the sward of the overflow car park at a country fair – which I unrolled and immediately split down the middle with the aid of a pair of tin snips.

Snip. Figured I only needed a 50mm strip down the centre of the path

A hideously cheerful, bright glossy green – quite revolting – but thankfully grass has already begun to grow up through the holes, and is doing a fair job of obscuring the playground-bright colour. With at least another three months of potential sogginess before us, it’s early to form a definitive opinion but, so far, I am impressed by the difference it’s made. No substitute for my lovely brick path. But, while I’m pining for that, at least I can get to the end of the garden and back.

Tuesday, 10 November 2015

The admission causes me a degree of discomfort, having on numerous occasions made my admiration for weeds a matter of record, but even I find it hard to wax lyrical about hairy bittercress.

“Hairy bastard cress, more like”, a gardening friend of mine once quipped. It’s hard not to sympathise. Whilst the leaves of Cardamine hirsuta – a plant in the brassica family, closely related to mustard and also to garden cress Lepidium sativum – might possess a certain peppery, cress-like taste, it’s difficult to know what it’s good for. You would be bonkers to go out of your way to deliberately grow a crop, not least because surely every plant container in Christendom is sure to become home to at least one or two specimens in any given year.

It’s a nuisance in the nursery – perhaps not to the same degree as the liverworts which blanket the surface of the growing medium, but nonetheless a pretty ubiquitous presence, stealing nutrients and acting as a host for numerous glasshouse pests.

It’s also something of a gremlin in the garden, and you need be in no doubt that you will have hairy bittercress in your garden. Possibly also its cousin, wavy bittercress (Cardamine flexuosa) – very similar in appearance, though the small white flowers have six stamens to the four of its nominally more hirsute relative (the hairs on the leaf margins and axils aren’t particularly noteworthy, in spite of the name). As long as extremes are avoided, bittercress can’t bring itself to be discerning over the pH of the soil, seeming just as at home in acid, neutral or alkaline conditions, and will grow in shade, part shade or sun, in either moist or dry conditions. A hardy annual (C. flexuosa sometimes persisting as a short-lived perennial) it behaves as an ephemeral weed, producing several generations in one growing season, and each plant can produce up to 5,000 seeds.

Not wavy, but downy. Four stamens, so Cardamine hirsuta

Garden designer Chelsea Uribe (@CUgardendesign) pithily summed up generally held opinions on the plant. “That sodding little ruderal. I wish it every ill.” A coloniser of recently disturbed ground, it’s readily identifiable from its rosettes of bright green pinnate foliage with almost circular leaflets at the base, becoming more elongated higher up the plant. Weeding it out isn’t a particularly satisfying experience – although not deep rooted, it’s quite fiddly to handle when it first emerges, and so you might be tempted to allow a clump to grow to a more convenient size for hand-pulling. In which case, you’d best ensure this forward-dated task doesn’t slip your mind, due to the speed at which it will flower and seed.

Common names include lambs cress, spring cress, hoary bittercress, wood cress and flickweed. This last name is particularly descriptive of the manner in which the plant goes about dispersing seed, a trick which anyone who has carelessly reached for a plant which has gone to seed will be only too able to describe. The characteristic long, thin seed pods (known as a siliqua), common to many members of the brassica family, split open when dry, ejecting their contents with some force and scattering seed over a distance of up to six feet, unless prevented from doing so by some intervening object. Such as the face of a surprised gardener.

The ripening seed pods, or silique, ‘overtopping’ the flowers

In Old English herb-lore, bittercress is known as Stune, and included as one ingredient in the Nine Herbs Charm recommended as a cure for poisoning and infection. Given the generally poor state of health and hygiene we can assume in Dark Age Britain, this suggests that each of the nine herbs would have been in constant demand. I have my suspicions regarding the efficacy of bittercress a medicinal plant, but, by including it on the list of ingredients, our ancestors had clearly devised a way to guarantee a sustained and wide-ranging harvest of the stuff. They probably didn’t like it any more than we do

Let me know what your thoughts are on hairy bittercress, either on Twitter, or by leaving a comment below.

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